A World Where Time Is Money Wastes Its Own Clock

Andrew Niccol’s In Time has one of the great science fiction premises of its decade and no idea what to do with it. In the 2169 of the film, the aging gene is switched off at 25, a one-year countdown starts on your forearm, and time itself becomes the money. Run out and you die instantly. That is a clean, brutal engine for a story. In Time spends 109 minutes idling next to it.

Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.

Dayton and the Price of a Bus Ticket

The world-building is the best thing here. Niccol splits society into Time Zones: Dayton, a manufacturing ghetto where nobody carries more than 24 hours, and New Greenwich, where the rich hoard enough time to be effectively immortal. Prices climb constantly to keep the poor poor. It is a sharp idea, stated once and then repeated.

Justin Timberlake plays Will Salas, a 28-year-old Dayton factory worker. He rescues Henry Hamilton, a drunken 105-year-old with 116 years on his clock, from the thug Fortis and his Minutemen. Hamilton explains that New Greenwich hoards the time and inflates prices to beggar everyone else. Then he transfers all but five minutes to Will and times out.

That gift makes Will a target. Raymond Leon, a Dayton-born Timekeeper, assumes Will robbed Hamilton. Will gives ten years to his friend Borel and leaves for New Greenwich with his mother, Rachel.

Rachel Salas and the Fare She Could Not Pay

Rachel’s death is the film’s one genuinely good scene, and it happens because of arithmetic. She works two days in the Garment District to pay off a two-day loan, and when the price of her bus fare rises, she cannot cover it. The driver tells her to run. She arrives seconds late. Will cannot save her.

That is the whole thesis in one sequence. The system does not need villains. It needs a fare hike.

The film’s problems:

• Amanda Seyfried’s Sylvia Weis is a hostage with a rich father and little else to do
• Cillian Murphy’s Leon is a cop with a grudge and no interior
• The third act turns into a chase movie that forgets its own rules

What In Time Gets Wrong

The premise promises a heist against time itself. What arrives is a run through a dystopia that never explains its own economy past the first act. If time is currency, who mints it? How does a vault of stored years not collapse the market? In Time never asks, because it is not interested.

Niccol wrote and directed, so the failure is his alone. He had Timberlake, Murphy, Olivia Wilde, Vincent Kartheiser and Matt Bomer, and he gave them a tagline instead of a script: “Live forever or die trying.”

The ranking of what actually works:

1. The premise and the Dayton/New Greenwich split
2. Rachel’s death, the only scene with real stakes
3. The cast, stranded
4. The chase-heavy final act

In Time grossed $174 million against a $40 million budget, so the idea sold. The execution did not. A film about the cost of living should feel like it costs something.

Andrew Niccol · Dystopia · In Time · Justin Timberlake · movie review · science fiction